


Solace

by crazyfish



Category: Original Work
Genre: 1980s, Bullying, Chess, Coming Out, Coming of Age, Drugs, F/M, Gang Violence, Gay Male Character, Guitars, Hispanic Character, LGBTQ Character of Color, Latino Character, Los Angeles, M/M, Male Character of Color, Murder, Mystery, Serial Killers, Teen Angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-03
Updated: 2014-03-03
Packaged: 2018-01-14 11:14:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1264330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crazyfish/pseuds/crazyfish
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Follow Ricardo as he tries to mend the rift with his family, after they found out in the most embarrassing way possible that he was gay. Now he must navigate gangs, drugs, a prowling serial killer, and avoid his crazy Aunt Inez to find his way back home again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Solace

Love, pray, submit—Of the many unwieldy Catholic ideas on the good life, fifteen-year-old Ricardo Mendez quite liked its proscriptions against birth control. A battalion of aunts, uncles, cousins was a boon when your life was a game of hide and seek from parents ever nagging, ever nattering. But this boon became bane when his brother Jesús was rushed to the emergency for stab wounds.

The day of the altercation was another of those Los Angeles winter days unnatural with stupendous sunshine. Students were ushering out for lunch and rumbling and chattering in the hallways as Jesús strode along and smiled wide in anticipation for his chicken mole lunch.

Another classmate, Hernandez, behind him, bellowed just over his ear, “I don’t mind you looking at my _chica_ wrong, but man, your _hermano_ ’s a _puta_? Something shitty runs in your house.”

Jesús’s face slacked grimly before Hernandez’s deformed smirk. “What did you say?”

“You heard me. Tell the _puta_ , I’m going to crack his skull for jumping my cousin—”

Jesús had bounded three, four steps and connected a swift punch against Hernandez's stubbly jaw. Hernandez did not stagger or waste time to comprehend the moment but replied dazedly with a punch to Jesús’ belly. One punch, a feint, another blow, and the scuffle degenerated into fists, curses, teenage jeers for someone to cut somebody already. But Ricardo was nowhere in sight to help his brother. Ricardo was in the parking lot, inside an electric-blue coupe, balls deep in Steve’s ass.

Sirens whined, paramedics scurried, pupils scrambled for the good seats to cheer the bloody theatre. No one noticed the car under the streetlamp rollicking and frolicking to a rhythm of conquest. The smell of clove cigarettes was thick and hot through the damp exertions. Steve had been the man of Ricardo’s moment for exactly seven minutes, if you believed the clock above the dial car radio blaring the top hit of the year, by Micheal Jackson and Paul McCarthy, “Say, say, say …”

 

“Fuck … Fuck …” That was Steve, man of Ricardo’s moment, blazing hot Steve with the cute dimple, tight Steve  _muy excellente_  on the trombone.

The ruckus of heat, sweat and wild feeling crescendoed on the cusp of triumph. But something, titanic, assaulted the car, knocking Ricardo out of his looming climax. On the windows were plastered with faces fractured in disgust.

And that was the end of that.

Jesús lay limp in a coma.  Hernandez’s heart was flat-lining as nurses flurried over belly wounds. Everyone in the municipality of Willow Heights murmured of dark days and dark afflictions. Ricardo’s relatives, not the least of all his parents, bickered over who knew the what, the why, and the when about Ricardo being a cocksucker. How could they have been mistaken about the ordered soul behind his coffee eyes, the flatter-than-Kansas buzz cut, the stocky shoulders, and tall swagger? Ricardo had deceived them. Really he had, as he did not lisp, or droop his hands, or say honey or _mi’jo_ , or could not even eat a slice of dulce tres leches. In fact it was less than two weeks ago when Ricardo tackled Carlos for catcalling at Rosa on the street.

“I knew him to be unnatural after he watered my pansies, and they died in three days,” Inez, Ricardo’s aunt, said.

Men and women nodded sourly over the corpse-straight body festooned with pipes and tubes, the chemical hospital smell, the beeps of the heart machine.

“You blamed my cat for killing your pansies,” Officer Guillermo said.

Everyone nodded again. Inez Cruz, in her youth, married Jesus in a convent, cheated on Jesus, now lived as a severe spinster math teacher. She gave up Catholicism (a rabble of idolatry) for the true Christian fellowship of Iglesias Pentecostal de Dios. Every Sunday in a hole-the-wall church, you could see her in a navy blouse and knee-length black skirt, stamping her little hand at the air as if she alone could hold back the tide of principalities, powers, the rulers of darkness, spiritual wickedness in high  _places,_ but apparently not the wickedness in Ricardo. And now she was shaking her head morosely, wishing her spent, thin prayers over the pansy and would-be-brother killer had been supplemented with thirty-day fasts.

If Ricardo were there in the hospital ward, he would stick out his tongue at her and call her Aunty Abomination. But he was in his bedroom, splayed on the top-bunk and searing amongst the hot coals of panic.

Shadows sliced over the thrift-store dresser and swayed over the rug bridging the two islands of bunk beds and careered over the tall closet by the door. One side of the room was the girl corner littered with cabbage patch dolls and garbage pail kids, and the other side, the boy corner fortified against girly invasions with a menacing poster of Tony Montana.

Above him, the ceiling teemed with the glow-in-dark stars, planets, fishes—presents from his father, Benito. As the shadows lengthened, they took green life, they glowed a light useless for sight, they became baleful sconces lighting up the way of the chaotic unknown. He felt his heart yaw in his chest and plash up into a puddle useless to beat out a time that had since become timeless.

Jesús might die because of him. He held his chest and sought the knives stabbing gathering in there. Jesús was going to die, all because of him ….

His day had been a litter of circuit breakers that failed to trip and force him to his senses. Why didn’t he take the hint of friends declining ominously Steve’s invitation to drive out of campus for lunch? His father had slapped his head several times for smelling like tobacco, and still he accepted the offer of clove cigarettes. The cigarettes had to break up and catch fire, and Steve had to jump and splash over his chest to put out the fire and he had to guide Steve’s hand over his nipple _. How the hell did that happen? La Virgencita_ , why?

Why did he accept the offer of clove cigarettes in the back seat of the car when he thought smoking was stupid? The cigarettes had to break up and catch fire, and Steve had to jump into the back and splash over his chest to put out the fire, and he had to guide Steve’s hands over his crotch _. La Virgencita_ , why?

He blew it.

After the fracas over Carlos and Rosa, a shouting match against his father had ended with him staying the night at Tío Gaspar’s. He returned the next day and sidled to his mother’s wide croup installed in front of a television episode of Dynasty and said, “Mami, Carlos told Rosa to eat his churro. (Selena’s face drooped into a frown) Mami, Rosa is like our sister, no? Talk to Papi for me, I didn’t mean to give Carlos a black eye (Selena’s eyes reawakening to deeper ire). Mami, I’ll wash the car. I’ll go take double M’s to Tía Yolanda’s house.  _Por favor_?” He made the squishy piteous face perfected since he was one-year old, the face he made when he imagined muscular He Man embracing him, flinging him high into the heavens, and miraculously catching him with his great big hands. Before long Selena ordered him to do the dishes, plated him some empanadas, all the while wailing about how his good looks would be the death of her.

And the death of Jesús it seemed.

Ricardo was certain he would be ordered to leave, but could he charm his way back home?

Sounds skirled through the drywall frames of the house and reverberated in the hollow of the room. He shuddered violently. His parents have come home already? Or was it his twin sisters, Marisol and Magdalena, being silly again with the leftover party horns from Esmeralda’s engagement party?

Refusing to wonder, worry or waver, he leaped off the bed and proceeded to prepare a duffel bag.

Darkness swam in the long cold corridor, it layered over the cool tiles of the living room, it susurrated with the slight clinging of the plastic blinds out of sight in the distant dark. He opened the front door. A wind soughed coldly its unwelcome scent of pine. Up ahead, a street lamp flickered pathetic filigree shadows on the moonlit pavement. Its buzzing rankled him louder, more discordant over the wayward whirrs of cars passing by. Even in this urban grid of chain fences and errant bullet holes, the way forward was unfailingly clear.

It was nine pm when Ricardo arrived at Paraíso Housing Projects. Moonlight trailed a ghostly white over the black roofs of cars lining the side of the street. Hunched over boom boxes booming, men congregated around street lamps, in threes and fours. Ricardo showered obligatory hola’s in moribund octaves before tottering a knock at the door of his cousin, Angelica Mendes.

She stood at the door, a limp hand on her small hip. Her brows arched to a hard right and her lips scrunched to a hard left. Her hair was a prickly fruit of pink fuzz, and her cheeks were peeling with powdery slats of makeup. Her face visited upon Ricardo a prevision of his doom. He stalled, his throat heavy. Blindly, he reached for the wide shine of a rock star’s smile and did the silly gun pointing with the fingers in her face.

“ _Hola_ _favorite cousin_ _,_ your hair so flash. Me like it, _”_ _he said_ _._

“Shut it,” she said harshly. “What did you do this time?” Ricardo rubbed over imagined pimples on his smooth cheek. She said, “Fuck it. I don’t care. You’ll look after Pablito tomorrow.”

“I’ll do anything you want,  _Mi’ja,_  even tell Dewayne you like him. You like ’em big?”

“Shut it.” No inviting smile. No intrusive questions on his escapades. She turned inside by herself, leaving Ricardo at the doorway. He watched the back of her bare thighs underneath the loose satin shorts as she cornered a dim corridor. It was him alone now peering into the dull smallness of the living room, the dumb blue walls, and then from the recesses of the corridor, the sound of Pablo puling louder. He flounced inside and shut the door too loudly before a geyser could erupt.

He lay crumpled on the couch, blinking fitfully into the leopard spots of shadows swirling over the wall.  His blanket felt like a sheet of briars, and his heartbeat ascended mountains. There was only one thing to do: hope.

The next day he skipped school—state-sanctioned doodling time—and ran after five-year-old Pablo all day in the one-bedroom apartment. Angelica returned from her day with paper bag groceries in her arms and a smile tucked in her lips. The phone rang, and she pushed her grocery bounty onto Ricardo. She scattered across the parlor strewn with alphabets blocks and toy trucks to answer the phone gleaming white under the fall of sunlight.

She tinkled an exuberant ‘hola.’ Electronic conversation was out of reach from the ears of Ricardo who was undecided whether the jar of bacon bits belonged in the fridge or the disarray of shelves overhead. Putting away the groceries animated him with odd purpose: bread there, yogurt here, twizzlers for me. He folded the paper bags and whirled around the kitchen in a baffle over where to put them away. Angelica was now perched at the kitchen doorway. Her sleeve fell over her shoulder bumped against the wall glossed blue. Her eyes were small, tight, and precariously unreadable.

“I hear you like dick,” she said, her voice etched of its warmth.

Ricardo halted. Suddenly the paper bags seemed better placed on the counter next to the neat stack of envelopes, but then again, the brown bags next to the white ladder of letters looked so crass. Maybe the top of the fridge or the five rung of drawers to his right?

In a rumble of disgust, she grabbed the paper bags from him and stuffed them into the tall blue trashcan by the fridge. “You can stay one more night and that’s it.”

Billows of deeper and deeper unease rushed on him. He asked in a shaky tone searching for the good old times, “That’s harsh, favorite cousin _._ You’re going to make me beg Tío Gaspar for a place to stay? He’s so bunk.”

“Jesús is in critical care because of you.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too, but you have tonight and that’s it.”

“Tiger Balls, I’ll leave now.”

Ricardo was on the bus again, savoring oleaginous diesel in his lungs, overlooking the pastiches of graffiti, ice cream trucks and pushcarts of tropical fruit.  _Puta Madre._ Going home seemed the best course of action. Yep home and owning up to his snafu.

Benito was a delivery truck driver. Selena, his wife, cleaned hotel rooms. Grit, persistence, overbearing sunshine had allowed them a two-bedroom house in Willow Heights. Ricardo could see the corner of the green gutters rounding the roof of his house, then the hanging flowerpot drooping tiny-leafed stems onto the railing of the front porch. The front gate was open and the station wagon was in the carport, which meant Benito was home. Suddenly Ricardo had to admit that it was March and still winter, and still a cold, dry afternoon, and his fingers were stiff as stones. He shook out his hands, rubbed them on his lap, tented them despairingly under his chin and went inside. Selena sagged low and dour on the loveseat adjacent to the television stand. On either side of her, his twin sisters buried sobs and gasps onto the gathered sleeves of her arms.

In moments like these, Ricardo would reach into his storehouse of jokes to disarm the iciest of moments, but Selena lifted red eyes, and he slopped into a puddle of silence. The design runnels on the sofa upholstery, the lace doily over the armrest, the wood grain of the television stand, never demanded so much admiration in his short life. His mouth was dry, and his throat was heavy. He steadied himself on the glass coffee table before his mother.

“How’s Jesús?” Ricardo asked.

“Still in a coma.” Selena fidgeted with a handkerchief over the floral lake of her lap. “Hernandez will live.”

His mind drew an abysmal blank over why she mentioned Hernandez.  _Fuck Hernandez_. He was angry again, and anger raked him such an ugly emotion when his mother was so expansively and tearfully motherly.

“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry,” Ricardo said in apology for his own carcass of feelings that could not submit.

Selena’s hand hardened on her lap, and Ricardo imagined in her tawny-veined fists were held back the words too crude for a mother to say.

“What do you mean sorry? Sorry that you were caught? That Jesús took a knife because you tried to rape José—”

“Rape? José was just as stoked—” Selena’s face fell. Ricardo took a deep breath and blotted out the feelings of when José held tighter than bone during Esmeralda’s party.

“Jesús is in a coma because of this _pato_?” Benito’s tight voice interrupted from behind him.

Yes, his brother was Jesus dying for the sins of the ass-fucker. _Tiger balls._ Why the hell did Jesús have to ruin his life after they had a gentleman’s agreement to stay the fuck out of each other’s way and show up funerals? Maybe he should explain how the fight was months in building, starting with Jesús being sprung on Hernandez’s gal pal.

Ricardo bent over his knees, refusing to turn around and dare the mustached glower of his father’s.

“Ten minutes!” Benito shouted. “Ten minutes to leave my house before I get a knife of my own.” His footsteps shuffled away into the silence of glares from Selena and sisters.

Ricardo swallowed hard. “Mami, please—”

“Can’t deal with you right now. Everyone’s talking about you and the white boy. How you—” She muffled a hand over her lips.

“ _Hermano’s_  a butt rat,” Marisol said.

“ _Hermano’s_  a butt-fucker—” Madgalena added.

“Shut up, both of you!” Selena cried, most forlornly. “Jesús is in the hospital fighting for his life. I just can’t deal with you right now. Please, just do as your Papi says and go stay with Yolanda or something

“But I don’t want to stay with her,” Ricardo said unthinkingly.

She took a deep breath, cutting through his aimless urge to grumble. Her lips drooped, and Ricardo, chastised, looked down onto the rug. A sniffle interjected the tenuous and quivering calm, and another sniffle, then she clasped her face, unable to stop her tears.

“ _Mi’jo,_ I can’t deal with you right now,” she pleaded. “Whatever you need to do, just get it on your own. I just can’t deal with you right now.”

Ricardo understood; absence was indeed the best policy for now. Rubbing his lip, he calculated a mental map of relatives. “Can I have some money?”

She said nothing while Ricardo melted and evaporated. She said nothing when Ricardo decided himself to look through her purse and took five twenties. He was out the front door, under the narrow canopy dazzling in the brisk sunlight. The long road skimmed off to the East, glimmering blackly into the disorder rumbling up into the horizon. And now began his Via Dolorosa.


End file.
